Today, we'll recap our first episode of the RevTech Podcast featuring Jessie Shipman, founder of Flunicy, a company evolving in sales and partnership collaboration.
Listen to the podcast as we explore Flunicy's journey, GTM strategy and their exciting product developments and see the highlights below.
Sales Pitch Round: Fluincy’s Story
Fluincy's beginnings are deeply rooted in Jessie's background in education as a high school teacher and her passion for partner enablement, “her life’s best work” at Apple within the Strategic Partner organization. At Apple, Jessie developed these incredible better together stories with partners, but was only meeting with people once a quarter and the forgetting curve was an issue. What she needed was “...to give them the little bit of information they need around the context that is part of their job.” And thus Fluincy, an innovative platform designed to bridge the gap between sales people and the potential partner solutions that fill customers’ needs. Fluincy acts as the first step in partner engagement, identifying suitable partners and kickstarting collaboration.
Fluincy specializes in uncovering partnership and referral revenue from everyday conversations. The core platform solution finds partners in sales calls based on specific keywords within call transcripts, which creates awareness about partners by surfacing those who can address specific problems, a proactive approach that surpasses the traditional method of partner matching based solely on customer overlap. This emphasis on clarity and education underscores Fluincy's commitment to making partnerships not just a growth hack but a strategic and sustainable approach to business expansion.
Fluincy's agility in turning conversational insights into executable tasks ensures partners are engaged effectively, enhancing the overall go-to-market strategy.
Capital Round: Building Sustainability and Value
When it comes to starting a new company, Jessie has chosen the path of bootstrapping with an initial goal of securing five to six paying customers, ensuring operational costs are covered and being profitable. The bootstrap approach allows Jessie to focus mainly on value creation rather than adhering to predetermined growth targets, listen to a snippet of what value creation means to Jessie:
This approach has given Jesse the opportunity to pivot, innovate and respond to the needs of customers. Fluincy is still in its early stages with one paying customer and three additional customers onboarding.
Go-to-Market Strategy Round: Founder-Led Sales at its’ Finest
Fluincy's ICP sweet spot is with companies with ecosystems larger than five partners right now because “the problem [Fluincy] is trying to solve is… the capacity of the human brain to remember the better together stories of not only your product, but all of the products in your ecosystem.”
Jessie emphasized the importance of founder-led sales and the give-get model, hear it all here:
A pivotal aspect that sets Fluincy apart from traditional enablement platforms like Seismic and BrainShark is its actionable and directional approach. While these platforms act as repositories of information, Fluincy transforms conversational data into actionable steps. Instead of drowning in data, users receive precise directives, empowering them to take immediate and informed actions. And while Gong creates transcripts and identifies keywords, it does not include all the steps after the identification to start an ecosystem motion, like knowing which partner to recommend and how to get in touch with them.
Beyond "competitors", there are ways to do what Fluincy does without a platform at all, it's just not scalable, hear Jesse share more about that:
By bridging the gap between information and action, Fluincy empowers organizations to truly capitalize on their partner ecosystems, making partner interactions more meaningful, streamlined, and impactful than ever before. Fluincy's journey in revolutionizing the go-to-market landscape continues, promising a future where partner engagement is not just informative but transformational.
Demo Round: Simplifying Partner Enablement with Actionable Insights
Watch a snippet of the demo:
Designed with simplicity in mind, the interface offered a comprehensive view of partner interactions within an organization. By clicking on a user's name, partner managers can gain insights into which partners were surfaced in conversations, how many times and the level of engagement.
One of Fluincy's standout features is its ability to provide detailed insights. When a partner was surfaced in a conversation, Fluincy not only displayed the partner's information but also the specific call-to-action, ensuring clarity for users. Fluincy's displays all of this in Slack to avoid the additional barrier of sales teams logging into another platform.
Fluincy’s boosts a number of active integrations, including Slack, Google Drive, Zoom, and a custom Chrome extension allowing Slack’s action-oriented nature to engage sales teams effectively.
In the future, Jessie is aiming to introduce detailed context, including the specific keywords triggering partner matches to empower users with a deeper understanding of their engagements. Generally, the product strategy is going where customers are asking to go, so if a paying customer wants a CRM integration to track influenced revenue, Fluincy will build it, which is the benefit of buying start-up technology with a customer-first founder. Fluincy is also working through how to utilize generative AI to craft messages that salespeople could send recommending a partner based on the context of the conversation and the use case of the partnership.
Trends Round: Partner Tech is Evolving Beyond Just Channels
Ecosystems are becoming a growth strategy that investors are asking about, therefore companies need to be looking at ways to build their partnership ecosystem, beyond just channel partners. Jessie observes a shift in focus from partner technology focusing on enterprise customers and shifting to mid-market companies. With the emergence of innovative point solutions like Fluincy, smaller companies now have the opportunity to invest in technology tailored to their needs. The key is going to be how these point solutions integrate together to allow their customers to grow their partner programs alongside them and with being partner tech, the hope is that these companies will partner better and quicker than the SaaS industry did, listen to Jessie break it down:
Kudos to the Industry Round
Throughout our conversation, Jessie emphasizes the significance of genuine connections, acknowledging those who believed in her journey as a founder. She gave shoutouts to number of remarkable partner tech companies and leaders:
Greg Portnoy from Euler
Kenny & Cody at ParterFleet
As the business landscape continues to evolve, partnerships will remain a cornerstone of growth and innovation. Navigating the complexities of partnerships requires a strategic approach, emphasizing collaboration and tools like Fluincy are helping companies do just that.
Find Jesse on LinkedIn where as long as she’s not asleep she will respond
Learn more about Fluincy at getfluincy.com
Check out Jessie’s podcast Literal Scratch with Adam Pasch and Aaron Howerton to hear more about Partnership, life and their jobs and hopefully have a laugh in the process!
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